April 2013

Raw files are good for a lot of reasons, and one of the most useful is allowing you to make full use of your camera’s dynamic range after you take the shot. One place where this comes in handy is when you’re on the edge of having enough light to make an image. Perhaps you don’t have a tripod and your shutter speed is creeping down into motion blur territory, or you’re shooting in the near dark and already have your ISO up as high as you want to go.

It seems appropriate that on a day when I was working on my new talk on photo composition, my friend Hy and I visited an exhibition of Garry Winogrand’s photos. Winogrand’s professed ideas about composition fly in the face of almost every piece of conventional wisdom. At least to hear him speak (in retrospect only now, as he passed away in 1984), photos did not and could not contain narrative or tell a story. For him only the grains of film within the frame mattered.